An occasional series of short opinions on current matters at the Utah State Legislature.

Pointless assignment

If Rep. Aaron Tilton gets his way, prospective Utah drivers would have to practice composition along with parallel parking. The Springville Republican is sponsoring a bill that would require all teens applying for a license to write a 10-page report about a teen who was killed in a car accident. House Bill 322 would also require high schools to maintain lists of students killed in car accidents for prospective drivers to write about.

Tilton told reporters that he was inspired to draft the bill after his niece was killed in a crash in Hobble Creek Canyon. He said he wanted to get young drivers to think about the consequences of reckless driving.

It's a nice thought, but a flawed one. Ten pages is too much to write about a dead teenager. A page, maybe; but 10 pages is impractical. It's busy work: the report doesn't even have to be any good by objective standards. We suspect that this bill would even give rise to a black market in dead-teen reports.

More important is the matter of respect for the deceased. How many grieving parents would want their child to become the ongoing subjects of badly written student reports about reckless driving, especially if they do not accept the fact that their child was recklessfi

Game over

Common sense is finally prevailing in the violent video game debate on Capitol Hill.

After repeated warnings that Rep. Scott Wyatt's proposal to ban the sale of violent video games to children would never survive a lawsuit, Rep. Kay McIff, R-Richfield, has stepped forward with a way to ease Utah away from the brink. McIff proposes to replace House Bill 50 with a resolution condemning video game violence.

A resolution, which carries no legal weight but makes a philosophical statement, avoids the risk of a lawsuit and allows Wyatt to save face. This is an issue that is best left to parents and the video game industry.

Better preliminary research and smarter bill writing at the front end of the legislative process would save valuable time. We'd like to see several lawmakers engage in a little more consultation and exercise a little more discipline in the bills they choose to introduce. New laws are not the answer to every little problem.

No more quotas

Rep. Neil Hansen wants to make sure police officers don't write traffic tickets just to raise money. The Ogden Democrat is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit police chiefs from imposing ticket quotas. He came up with the legislation after his daughter got a ticket and the officer told him that the city required officers to write a certain number of citations a day. (Inquiring minds want to know why Hansen was talking to the officer if it was his daughter who got the ticketfi Hmmmm ...)

Ogden police officials admit that officers have been evaluated on their ticket writing productivity -- the same excuse Provo used for its own thinly veiled ticket quota.

Hansen's bill is opposed by the Utah Association of Chiefs of Police because, as association president Michael Larsen told legislators, it would prohibit chiefs from telling officers to write any tickets at all. Larsen said tickets are used to modify the behavior of drivers, not to generate revenue.

We don't believe this one for a second. Enforcement standards are handed down from the top, and police chiefs are political animals with budget expectations. If behavior modification of drivers were the primary goal, as alleged, then ticket writing could be swapped for a simple increase in police visibility-- as it is in Hawaii. Traffic officers in Honolulu drive around with bright blue lights on top of their vehicles. Drivers see the light from blocks away and adjust their behavior.

This approach fosters community cooperation with police, unlike police ambushes (known as speed traps) that are used by too many local police officers to meet their quotas -- er, performance standards. In Lehi, local cops even roll up onto the freeway to generate revenue at an even faster rate.

If quotas were not the norm, then police chiefs wouldn't be fighting this bill. After all, they could simply say that once quotas are outlawed, officers may write as many tickets as they please.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A6.